You and me, part 2

I want to speak to you, you, but I am afraid that everything I say is a lie. I feel the fraudulence rising from my sentences even as I write them, gaining in stench as I pile on words, each more false than the last. Here is the problem: I want to speak to you. You, I assume, also want to speak to me. But if lies are the only coin we have, then should we barter in lies rather than not barter at all?

What I am looking for most of all is a feeling. Meaning, after all, is a shared feeling. We cram words together clumsily and hope for meaning to pass, in the way that some cram their bodies together clumsily and hope for love to appear. We know, we should know, that love doesn't come from the mechanics of sex, but why should meaning come any more from the mechanics of language? The two are not the same, I know. But we often have one, and assume the other; we speak, and assume meaning; and never consider the possibility that our speech stops at speech, our words reach no further than themselves.

I would like to say that true meaning is as rare as true love. We go days or weeks or months without encountering a single living word, but instead walk through graveyards of words. They glint dully, the words you exchange with your barista or your wife or read in the paper or a novel - or a blog. Ask yourself: is there meaning behind these words, or are they simply transactions, and nothing more? We often say that if you could describe a piece of music in words, then you wouldn't need the music. But the same unspeakable, wondrous, felt quality is possible for words too, and when meaning happens the words themselves disappear, even as they mean.

If you seek to mean, then, know that you are in for a terrible time. But it can be done; as in the last lines from "Song of Myself":

I depart as air, I shake my white locks at the runaway sun,
I effuse my flesh in eddies, and drift it in lacy jags.

I bequeath myself to the dirt to grow from the grass I love,
If you want me again look for me under your boot-soles.

You will hardly know who I am or what I mean,
But I shall be good health to you nevertheless,
And filter and fibre your blood.

Failing to fetch me at first keep encouraged,
Missing me one place search another,
I stop somewhere waiting for you.

Or these, from Hart Crane:

And so it was I entered the broken world
To trace the visionary company of love, its voice
An instant in the wind (I know not whither hurled)
But not for long to hold each desperate choice.

I once asked myself, upon reading difficult poetry, what it meant; I see now this is the wrong question, or not the most useful one. For even as I asked it, I felt a stirring as I read the words that I did not understand; perhaps words have to resist conventional meaning in order to carry something else. You might ask me to explain what these words by Whitman or Crane mean, or mean to me; but if I could, then why would we need these words by Whitman and Crane? I will not use words to explain meaning. Meaning and words are not the same; and when meaning is at its strongest, words can be its deadliest enemy.

As I say, we may all be in for a terrible time. But I think - I think - we must try. I admit that I'm impatient: I want clarity, focus, I want to find words only to forget them. I want to be pithy all the time, I want to be a human Pith-machine. But the road ahead is long; and what would be the value of meaning if it were easy?